Driving Down Unknown Roads(The Feminization Of America)

In the United States women are, I think for the first time in history, gaining real power. Often nations have had queens, heiresses, and female aristocrats. These do not amount to much. Today women occupy positions of genuine authority in fields that matter, as for example publishing, journalism, and academia. They control education through high school. Politicians scramble for their votes. They control the divorce courts and usually get their way with things that matter to them.

If this is not unprecedented, I do not know of the precedent. What will be the consequences?

Men have controlled the world through most of history so we know what they do: build things, break things, invent things, compete with each other fiercely and often pointlessly, and fight endless wars that seem to them justifiable at the time but that, seen from afar, are just what males do. The unanswered question is what women would, or will, do. How will their increasing influence reshape the polity?

Women and men want very different things and therefore very different worlds. Men want sex, freedom, and adventure; women want security, pleasantness, and someone to care about (or for)them. Both like power. Men use it to conquer their neighbors whether in business or war, women to impose security and pleasantness.

I do not suggest that the instinctive behavior of women is necessarily bad, nor that of men necessarily good. I do suggest that that the effects will be profound, probably irreversible, and not necessarily entirely to the liking of either sex. The question may be whether one fears most being conquered or being nicened to death.

Consider what is called the Nanny State by men, who feel smothered by it, but is accepted if not supported by women, who see it as protective and caring. (Yes, I know that there are exceptions and degrees in all of this, and no, I don’t have polling data.) Note that women are much more concerned than are men about health and well-being. Women worry about second-hand smoke, outlawing guns, lowering the allowable blood-alcohol levels for drivers, making little boys wear helmets while riding bicycles, and outlawing such forms of violence as dodge ball or the use of plastic ray guns. Much of this is demonstrably irrational, but that is the nature of instincts. (Neither is the male tendency to form armed bands and attack anyone within reach a pinnacle of reason.)

The implications of female influence for freedom, at least as men understand the word, are not good. Women will accept restrictions on their behavior if in doing so they feel more secure. They have less need of freedom, which is not particularly important in living a secure, orderly, routine, and comfortable life. They tend not to see political correctness as irritating, but as keeping people from saying unpleasant things.

The growing feminizaton accounts for much of the decline in the schools. The hostility to competition of any sort is an expression of the female desire for pleasantness; competition is a mild form of combat, by which men are attracted and women repelled. The emphasis on how children feel about each other instead of on what they learn is profoundly female (as for that matter is the associated fascination with psychotherapy). The drugging of male schoolchildren into passivity is the imposition of pleasantness by chemical means. Little boys are not nice, but fidgety wild men writ small who, bored out of their skulls, tend to rowdiness. They are also hard for the average woman to control and, since male teachers are absent, gelded, or terrified of litigious parents, expulsion and resort to the police fill the void. The oft-repeated suspension of boys for drawing soldiers or playing space war is, methinks, a quietly hysterical attempt to assuage formless insecurity.

The change in marriage and the deterioration of the family are likewise the results of the growth of political power of women. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen, but it is assuredly happening. Divorce became common because women wanted to get out of unsatisfactory marriages. In divorce women usually want the children, and have the clout to get them. But someone has to feed the young. Thus the vindictive pursuit of divorced fathers who won’t or can’t pay child support. And thus the rise of the government as de facto father to provide welfare, tax breaks, daycare, and otherwise behave as a virtual husband.

When women entered a male workplace, they found that they didn’t much like it. Men told off-color jokes, looked at protuberant body parts, engaged in rough verbal sparring as a form of social interaction, and behaved in accord with rules that women didn’t and don’t understand. Women had the influence to change things, and did. Laws grew like kudzu to ban sexual harassment, whether real or imagined. Affirmative action, in addition to being a naked power grab, avoids competition and therefore making the losers feel bad. It degrades the performance of organizations, sometimes seriously, but performance is a preoccupation of males.

Men are capable of malignant government, whether authoritarian or totalitarian, as witness North Korea or the Russia of Stalin. I don’t know whether women would behave as badly if they had the power. (I’d guess not.) But women have their own totalitarian tendencies. They will if allowed impose a seamless tyranny of suffocating safety, social control, and political propriety. Men are happy for men to be men and women to be women; women want us all to be women.

The United States becomes daily more a woman’s world: comfortable, safe, with few outlets for a man’s desire for risk. The America of wild empty country, of guns and fishing and hunting, of physical labor and hot rods and schoolyard fights, has turned gradually into a land of shopping malls and sensible cars and bureaucracy. Risk is now mostly artificial and not very risky. There is skydiving and scuba and you can still find places to go fast on motorcycles, but it gets harder. Jobs increasingly require the feminine virtues of patience, accommodation to routine, and subordination of performance to civility. Just about everything that once defined masculinity is now denounced as “macho,” a hostile word embodying the female incomprehension of men.

A case can be made that a feminized world would (or will) be preferable to a masculine. Perhaps. It is males who bomb cities and shoot people in Seven-Elevens. Yet the experiment has not been made. I suspect we will have the worst of both worlds: a nation in which men at the top engage in the usual wars and, a step below, women impose inutterable boredom.

In the United States women are, I think for the first time in history, gaining real power.

I have trouble believing that. It wasn't so long ago that most people lived their entire lives without ever meeting anyone from more than 200 miles away. In such a world, every imaginable kind of social structure must have been tried somewhere.

I doubt very seriously that this is the first time that women-as-a-class have achieved "real power." It's just that all the societies where this arose previously have disappeared from the planet for some reason, without leaving a trace.

You can find little pockets of matriarchal tribes and so on living in bushes, but all of the "tribes" that flourished at the expense of all others and came to dominate the Earth — basically the Indians, the Chinese, the Western Europeans, and the Arabs — all independently came up with the same idea of lifelong pair-bonding between men and women, and the notion that there is a huge benefit to everyone in arranging things such that men know who their children are, and live in the same house with them.

Any tribe or clan that came up with a different idea for how to arrange things has long since been replaced by some group who does do these things.

As ships began crossing oceans and "discovering new worlds," why is that we never once found a society of any size where women ran everything, and everyone there thought that was normal? As people around the planet became connected with one other during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, no one encountered even one successful society where the notion of women running things was considered everyday wisdom.

There is an amazing variety of customs on almost every other subject... what to eat, what clothes should look like, what God to believe in. But every single society that was still around to be 'discovered' two or three hundred years ago has the basic notions of lifelong pair-bonding; and men knowing and being responsible for their children. If your society did not invent or copy that system in your little corner of the world, people like you had been overrun, conquered or just faded away by the time the Columbuses and the Magellans arrived on the scene.

I seriously doubt that humans are so smart that we can analyze our situation here in the 21st century and decide that we don't need this remarkably successful organizing principle anymore. It's not like humans haven't been trying to create Heaven on Earth for millenia. The problem is that the closest any group of people ever got was in places where they had words for "husband" and "wife" and everyone knew what that meant.

I don't know the future. No one does. But everything I see around me in the world tells me that abandoning lifelong pair-bonding has a very high probability of turning out to be a fatal, irreversible, civilization-smashing and "tribe smashing" move of the sort that has led to extinction for so many other nations and tribes.

Why lifelong pair-bonding? Because it works. The people who do it flourish and take over the world. The other ones vanish from the planet. It is that serious an issue. We are talking about extinction, as in dinosaurs. We and our Western European fellows are, in a matter of a few generations, squandering a genetic and culturual legacy that was not really ours to "spend." Many people led hard lives to get us — their children's children's children — to where we are now. Who the Hell are we to decide that everything they did was in vain, and that it should all end here?

The birth rates in most Western (and Westernized -- like Jopan) countries are so far below the replacement rate that the cultural and genetic legacy known as "Denmark" will be gone from the Earth by the end of this centuray. It will survive only in books. The same with the Swedes, the Germans, the Italians. And if truth be told, among many of those with the same roots who are living here.

I don't know what caused it, and I don't know where it leads. But it worries me greatly that in all the years humans have been on this Earth, not one society where women gained "real power" has lived to tell about it.

I agree with the people here who say that Islam is at root a matriarchy. It is the culmination of the process Fred describes in this article, where a handful of the Biggest and Baddest males are seemingly "in charge," while the rest of the society stays frozen in the seventh century, unable to organize or accomplish Big Things. To the extent that men over there jump up and down and wave rocks at us to show us how tough they are, it's because that's the best they can do. They live in a place where everything is run by women. Their society never changes; it's boring; it's oppressive. In the usual inimitable way, there are never any female suspects or witnesses as to how this oppressive force called "Islam" stays in place. There's always a holy book to blame, or a front man wearing a beard. I don't buy it. Just look at it... Islam is Woman. It fights like a woman. It organizes its societies according to Monkey Rules, with a tiny cadre of alpha males pretending to be in charge, while virtually all the resources that do not go this handful of "powerful" men go to women. Monkey rules are at root a system for beggaring males... or at least, all but a relative handful of them.

I see I'll probably get flamed for that. I don't care.

White Feather Women
Let's you and him fight

Show me stats that women control the schools,please...

I am taking a guess but most principals and most school board members are MALE....

ever watch women's BB in college?...how many men are coaching women's sports, and ask yourself how many women are coaching men's sports?

If women are gaining all this power, why is it that the fastest buck a women can make is "exotic dancing" or prostitution, or nude modeling?

Look, women are not in control , will never be in control, have never been in control, period...

because a certain fringe group of women can get to be the occasional business whiz, does not mean that the vast majority of women are going to have that power....

most women are like me....working, raising families, charity work, etc etc...we're not setting the world on fire and for the most part are very happy to be the hands that rock the cradle....

women have made gigantic leaps in medicine and law....

but women will never take over the govt or the media or the corporate world where the real power exists....

everybody knows that the Jews have all that cornered....(sarcasm!)

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